Edwards Hall residents create escape room for Halloween

Residents of Edwards Hall spent seven days creating and producing an escape room for students to participate in an on-campus Halloween event.

John Ellison, a junior business management and marketing major from Lampasas, Aaron Jones, a junior Christian ministry major from Flower Mound, and Garrett Martin, a sophomore engineering major from Dallas, led a crew of 12 members.

Though Edwards has previously been home to a haunted house, this is the first escape room. Ellison said the crew found evidence of past Halloween events in the basement.

The experience uses almost the entire basement of Edwards, but there are only four actors.

“It took us about a week, but there were a lot of hours in that week,” Martin said.

Jones said they expect a large turnout despite little advertisement. In the week-long planning efforts the crew reached out to Frater Sodalis president Austin Parsons, GATA president Alex Hill and campus groups, such as LYNAY.

“We’re hoping to let word-of-mouth carry us and have another event with higher turnout on Saturday,” Martin said.

“If people go through again on Saturday, they’ll have better knowledge of what’s happening and maybe they could actually win if they lose the first time,” Jones said.

Martin said test groups averaged 15 minutes to win the escape room, though one group did lose.

Throughout the whole process, Martin said the best part was always the Walmart runs.

“We just walked around and asked, ‘Hey, what do we need in here?’ and just picked up the most random stuff and somehow made it work,” Martin said. “It was so much fun.”

The escape room is funded through the Residence Life budget.

Jones said the only setback the team faced was the absence of their makeup artist.

“The person we did have ended up having an obligation tonight, so Emily Parisi learned how to do stage makeup in less than an hour-and-a-half, and she’s doing great,” Jones said.

Parisi, junior accounting and finance major from Harker Heights, said she tried to remember everything she had seen on Instagram to help the group.

“I learned it yesterday and practiced bruises a little bit,” Parisi said. “Within a few hours, I had it down and kept doing it. I looked up a few YouTube videos to remind myself how to do it. In high school I helped with dramatic makeup for plays, but before this, I had never done it. I was pretty impressed I was able to learn it so quickly.”

The escape room will be open and free to students from 7-9 p.m. Wednesday night and from 8-11 p.m. Saturday.

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About Lauren Franco

My name is Lauren and I'm the Editor in Chief of the Optimist this year. I'm an avid fan of romantic comedies, the First Amendment and national parks. More than anything, I'm passionate about storytelling via photographs, and love getting to know the heart of people through my lens.